This deadly combination of disease causes Marc’s pancreas to devour itself, whilst his intestines become riddled with sores and his joints becomelacquered in uric acid.

These horrible afflictions have taken their toll. Marc stands just 4 feet, 11 inches and barely weighs 90 pounds, all as a result of his constant medications and corrective surgeries. To date the 19-year-old has spent more than aquarter of his life in hospital.

“I’ve struggled most with the ‘why me?’ “I don’t pretend there aren’t others with problems, but ultimately, I ask, ‘Why me?’ “

The UI freshman lives on a quiet wing of Burge Hall. College should be an exciting time for young adults but Marc’s extremely low blood count means he has interminable lethargy and is only awake for nine hours every day.

Labeled a “gimpy” or “cripple” as a child and excluded from playground games, Marc always found it difficult to fit in. However Marc states that it’s not his height that brings him down, it’s the sickness.

“I don’t care that I’m short, “Look at Danny DeVito. Danny DeVito’s a pimp, and he’s my height. Some of the world’s greatest people are short.”

Marc is now a musician with seven years of guitar-playing behind him, a scholar and a pre-med student determined to one day help others like him.

Marc was born on Oct 28th, 1988 at Northwest Community Hospital in the Chicago suburbs. It was thirteen months later that his mother, Nancy Lovendosk and father, Steve Zider began to notice inexplicable bruises which kept surfacing and receding all over Marc’s body.

The bruises which formed as larger multicolored blotches, were the signs of an acute lymphocytic leukemia which was quickly turning Marc’s white blood cells against themselves.

In order to survive, Marc needed a surge of white blood cell from a bone-marrow transplant.

As the families desperation began to grow, they turned to the closet match they could find, 5-year-old daughter Laura Zider, who could only offer a less-than-perfect transplant.

The surgery took place, doctors then bombarded the Marc with radiation and other powerful medications. The procedures were labelled a ‘success’ but, although there is nodefinitive proof that this care contributed to his later sickness, Marc, his family and his childhood doctors are convinced that the injection offoreign white blood cells coupled with the radiation treatment, resigned him to a life of unpredictable fatal illnesses.

Mary Hintermeyer, his primary nurse practitioner at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin in Milwaukee said,

“You don’t know what sort of problems someones going to have until they survive, “And Marc is one of the earliest long-term survivors of a bone-marrow transplant”

Marc adds, “It’s a contradiction. Something that saves your life also makes it a living hell.”

Several years after the transplant, during a period of relatively calm health, Marc;s illness came storming back.

Marc was in elementary school when both his femurs somehow became unhinged from their sockets,

“My hips were like an ice-cream cone, and the ice cream had fallen out of the cone.”

The sudden disability left Marc with two choices, never walk again, or never grow again.

He chose the latter, deciding he would undergo surgery to steady his hips using an infusion of growth-inhibiting steel pins. Over a year later Marc was able to grow a few more inches with the aid of growth hormones but fromadolescence on, Marc has and will continue to remain the same height,

Marc’s next ordeal began as soon as he started college. Only a few hours after arriving at his dorm room a severe pain began ripping and searing through his abdomen. The intense pain which Marc described as having thousands of pounds of rock pushing down on the your chest, was his second bout of pancreatitis and the closest he’s ever come to death.

Earlier that week, doctors prescribed Marc an extremely powerful medication known as colchicine, to help alleviate severe gout in his joints. Colchicine is supposed to suppresses inflammation in the joints, however the drug hurled his system into a chaotic state which nearly killed him.

UI sophomore and next-door neighbor Greg Wessels said,

“We’d never met him before, and all he said was, ‘I’m feeling pretty sick and need to use the bathroom,’ “And then he was gone; we didn’t see him until November.”

Marc spent the whole of his first semester at UIHC, while nearly 30 doctors struggled to keep him alive. On occasions Marc seemed to be giving in to the pancreatitis but shear determination, Marc pushed through and kept breathing.

Now out of the hospital and 25 percent lighter since his last visit to his college dorm room, all Marc wants is a beer. To be a regular college kid. But unfortunately for Marc, that’s something that will never happen.

Drinking alcohol places an incredibly heavy load on even the healthiest of kidneys, and for someone like Marc, who’s kidneys only work at around 25%, drinking one sip of alcohol could be fatal.

“It’s hard enough being a college student, but having no energy, not knowing anyone, and missing your first semester, it’s really hard,” “It’s tough to meet people. So at this point, I just sleep it off.”

According to the university Student Disability Services. Marc is one of 587 legally disabled students at the UI. In Iowa alone there are roughly 70,000 disabled residents. Across the nation, 32 million, equivalent to nearly one in 10, are disabled, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.